[62] "It seems somebody had maliciously told this Graham they were of the Whigs who used the field meetings, upon which, without any trial or other sentence than his own command, his soldiers fetched them all to Mauchline, a village where his headquarters were, and hanged them immediately, not suffering them to enter into any house at their coming, nor at the entreaty of the poor men would suffer one to lend them a Bible, who it seems offered it, nor allow them a moment to pray to God." Defoe's "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" were first published in 1717, a few years before Wodrow's History. Elsewhere in the same work he states that Claverhouse had "among the rest of his cruelties barbarously murdered several of the persecuted people with his own hands," also that "this man is said to have killed above a hundred men in this kind of cold blood cruelty." But Defoe's qualifications for a historian of those times are, to say the least, uncertain. He mentions Cameron and Cargill as alive and busy in 1684, four years after one had died fighting at Aird's Moss, and the other on the scaffold at Edinburgh.
[63] Wodrow, iv. 197; Napier, i. 89. I have called this the most authentic version because it professes to have come from the murderers themselves. It is to be found in a letter to Wodrow (printed by Napier) now in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. The date is 1715, and the writer, who only signs his initials, J.C., calls Wodrow "cousin." "I give you the account," he writes, "from the best information it's possible to be got, viz., from Robert Dun, in Woodheade of Carsphairn, and John Clark, then in that parish, now in Glenmont, in the parish of Strathone, anent the curate's death of Carsphairn, which they had from the actors' own mouths." Wodrow adds a little touch of his own—"Mr. Peirson with fury came out upon them with arms"—and is silent on the fact of Mitchell's presence.
[64] Fountainhall's "Historical Notices," and a letter to Queensberry from Sir Robert Dalzell and others, quoted by Napier, ii. 427-8.
[65] Wodrow, iv. 184.
[66] For example, the story told of Claverhouse sparing a man's life for the sport his capture had afforded, but ordering his ears to be shorn off. This may be found in a book called "Gleanings among the Mountains, or Traditions of the Covenanters," published at Edinburgh, in 1846, by the Rev. Robert Simpson, of Sanquhar. The same gentleman is responsible for an earlier volume, "The Times of Claverhouse," in which the Covenanters are described as a class of "quiet and orderly men," maintaining the standard of their gospel in "the most peaceful and inoffensive way." In neither volume is any authority offered for these stories: even the evidence of time and place is rarely vouchsafed.
[67] Walker's "Biographia Presbyteriana:" Lochiel's Memoirs.
[68] See ante, p. 92: also Napier, ii. 360, for a letter to the Lord Chancellor, June 9th, 1683. "I am as sorry to see a man die, even a Whig, as any of themselves. But when one dies justly, for his own faults, and may save a hundred to fall in the like, I have no scruple."
CHAPTER VIII.
Both in Scotland and England events were now moving fast to their inevitable conclusion, but of Claverhouse's part in public affairs there is for the next three years little record. Only two of his letters have survived between May, 1685, and October, 1688, when the disastrous march into England began. From one of these it is clear that his restoration to favour at Whitehall had not improved his position at Edinburgh. Gratitude was not then a common virtue among public men. Claverhouse had done for his colleagues all that he had promised. The recollection of their debt to him, and the unlikelihood of their being able to increase it, did not serve to endear to them this successful soldier of fortune, who had indeed helped them to their ambition, but who had thereby shown a dangerous capacity for helping himself. At the head of these malcontents was, of course, Queensberry, though, as the King had shown himself determined not to lose the services of his brilliant captain, it was necessary for the Treasurer to give his jealousy a guarded form. He complained to Dumbarton (then commanding the forces in Scotland) that Claverhouse had misused some of his tenants, though in what manner is not clear. There is a letter from Claverhouse expressing in respectful terms his regret at Queensberry's annoyance, which he declares to have been founded on misapprehension of the facts.